Leading the Losers in the Academic Arcade

Timothy Killeen, the president of the University of Illinois, was just awarded a $100K bonus for doing his job for the past year.

It feels churlish to begrudge him it.  He did reject a $225K bonus early on in his tenure here, citing the campus's ongoing budget problems and his brief--sustaining the glory of the institution when the state budget is in free-fall--is an impossible one.  For what it's worth, his salary (base + bonus) is dwarfed by the sums granted to academic luminaries like the U of I golf coach and Lovie Smith.

And, to be fair, he was set a series of challenges by the board, all of which he apparently met. Some items on the list, however, sound less like "goals" and more like a particularly detailed job description:

b. Work to ensure effective capital and maintenance programs, and appropriate facilities and infrastructure for all campuses 

c. Foster research opportunities to enhance teaching/learning strategies to improve academic programming 

..... 

a. Increase and enhance the visibility and positive reputation and ‘brand’ of the University at large 

b. Promote the University of Illinois at civic and other organizational meetings when possible; give more than 15 presentations to community and civic groups 

c. Engage key constituencies through targeted communications to increase advocacy efforts on behalf of the University 

d. Work with University of Illinois Foundation and University of Illinois Alumni Association to increase collaboration and cultivation opportunities with key donors, potential donors and alumni 

 There's also a lot of "seeking"--hard to know how the Board of Trustees decided how much "seeking" was enough to justify the money.

In today's paper, trustee Patrick Fitzgerald explains the video-game logic behind the payout. Don't call it a bonus!

Trustee Patrick Fitzgerald emphasized that Killeen’s award is “not a bonus. It’s something that’s earned.” 

“At least from my perspective, he’s earned every dollar of it. When you look at the leadership he’s shown, the leadership shown by the chancellors this year ... I think we’re headed in the right direction.”

I'm happy to have a president who can level up rather than bringing scandal to the university. That is, indeed, a step in the right direction. But isn't that level of leadership what the base salary is for? One might expect Fitzgerald, of all people, to understand that the rewards of excellent public service are not monetary.  His achievements as a federal prosecutor took down corrupt public servants ranging from former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich to Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff.  He did that work, presumably because it needed to be done and he was in a position to do it, not because someone dangled shiny financial incentives in front of him.

The University of Illinois, like many public institutions, runs on the willingness of people to do better in their jobs all the time, not because their efforts will result in a payout, but because the work needs to be done.

• Advisors in my department and adjacent departments who have worked hard to reverse declines in enrollment. No one has threatened to fire them in they fail, nor do they get remunerated for the increase--but it's obviously the thing that needs to be done, so they come up with effective ways to do it. 
• Faculty, both those with the job security of tenure and those without, who have radically changed their teaching in order to engage more students--not because their jobs depended on it, but because the students did. 
• A colleague who wrote 1000 words before lunch every day over the summer in order to get her new book project well underway (she's already full professor, so doesn't need it for promotion; nor is she particularly unusual in her dedication--it's what research faculty do). 
• Staff and faculty tacitly adding "social media management" to their job descriptions so as to foster a sense of collegiality in their units and make their colleagues' work available to a wider audience--not because they get more money for expanding their duties.   
• Rhetoric instructors who diligently sustain the programs of writing and research that energizes their teaching, even though they get no institutional recognition for that work. 
• Office staff and building and service workers who take on whole new unremunerated realms of job responsibility to keep the university moving forward in a hiring freeze.

(Sometimes faculty continue to strive for excellence, even though the incentives they are promised are not forthcoming. Campus-wide teaching awards are supposed to bring with them a salary bump. Several of my colleagues who have won these awards have seen the salary bonus withdrawn, not because they failed in their teaching, but because the administration decided that other one-time institution-wide salary increases invalidated those bonuses.)

The point is not that ALL superlative performance should be compensated financially--it's that the Board of Trustees is trying to lead through an incentive structure that has nothing to do with the way the work of the university gets done. Sure: everyone I know would like more money, but if money were what drove us towards excellence in our jobs, we'd be doing something else. If those of us doing the work of the university are dependent on chief executives who only do their jobs well in pursuit of financial incentives, then we're being led by people who don't understand the institution at all.

Winter is Here

The signs are unmistakeable.  Chicago State University is cancelling spring break, in an effort to race to the end of the semester before the money runs out.  The governor vetoed funding for MAP grants. Eastern Illinois University recently had to lay off 198 civil service employees.  Southern Illinois University is bracing for an additional $40 million in budget cuts.  Kishwaukee College will be laying off 17% of its workforce.   Parkland College is hiking its tuition 11.4%.

Even here at the Casterly Rock of Illinois higher public ed, we're feeling the chill winds. So frightening is the impending budgetary catastrophe that the our new president's draft strategic plan has attracted less snark than such documents usually do (although some of us will always rise to the occasion).  Credit where it's due: there's only a thin layer of bureaucratic cant and no tired metaphors (no loops, boxes, envelopes, peanut butter). The cringeworthy phrases are too oblique to make good targets ("lifewide learners," "innovation clusters"), and the tagline ("optimizing impact for public good") is too clunky to yield ironic variants but not inherently risible enough to amuse by itself.  

So we are left with the substance.  

As one of my faculty friends on Facebook wrote, 

is that document supposed to be meaningful? It seems like a crass collection of obvious platitudes put together to speak to the state legislature. I mean, fine, I guess, if we need something like that, but surely actual people who have actual jobs to do in the university aren't supposed to treat it seriously, are they?

After all, the presidents gets the six-figure salary, the house downstate, the condo in the big city, the country club memberships, and the various other perks of the office, so that he or she will use these accoutrements of power, and the dreadful corporate jargon that goes with them, to lobby the state legislature while we get on with our work.  In these dire times one would prefer to just leave him to get on with it and fire off the occasional "crass collection of obvious platitudes" as circumstances require.

The reason why I can't let it alone, though, is that public higher education is being redefined.  Crass platitudes are no longer simply repackaging "actual jobs...in the university" so that legislatures will continue to fund them; documents like these represent our upper administration's best effort to preserve our ability to keep doing what we do in the face of public pressure that is fundamentally reshaping the institutions in which we do it.

I prefer to believe, for now, that our new president is committed to a vision of public higher education that most of us would sign on to.  That's why this draft strategic plan is depressing as hell, and something we all need to think about.

In a recent blog post, I pointed out that we who teach and advise students

need to keep clearly in mind that our duty is to our students, many of whom will change careers several times in the course of their lives, and many of whom just haven't lived enough yet to know what kind of job will give them long-term satisfaction.  Our duty is NOT to corporate employers who would prefer to offload the training of an entry-level workforce on to institutions of higher learning.

The draft strategic plan lays out a diametrically opposite set of priorities.  Item 1, under the first "Strategic Goal" ("A Healthy Future for Illinois") on the first page of the document is

1. Prepare a “Next Generation” Workforce

U of I will identify the most critical current and future workforce needs of the State and build programs to prepare our students with the knowledge and competencies necessary to meet this demand while satisfying their professional and life goals. 

How are students to identify their "professional and life goals"? How are we going to help students respond to a changing world and not just the "changing demands of the workplace"?  What scope do we have to educate students for a world that exists beyond the workforce needs of the State of Illinois?  And who, exactly, gets to decide what those workforce needs are?

One looks in vain for evidence that a public university is the place to ask those questions.  Item 3 does, to its credit, set the goal of building "Strong Civic Engagement," but since it comes after enabling "Powerful Research and Development Partnerships," one can reasonably wonder who will get to decide what counts as "civic engagement." The state's "public, nonprofit sectors" do get named as potential partners, but these are the same sectors that are also getting starved by the current budget impasse.  It's seems unlikely that they will exert a pull equal to potential private partners.

"We are thus accountable to our students first and foremost" this document declares.  On page five of ten.  Strategic Goal II is "An Institution of and for Our Students."  We will do a lot of good things for the next generation workforce.  We will "create an inclusive community" and "build connections" to "nearby immigrant and minority communities."  We'll also make it easier for students to transfer between campuses.  Will we teach them things other than how to be part of a workforce?  They'll get "global competencies" and "pedagogical innovation" will be "brought to scale" so that everyone can get the benefit of it.  There will be online tools and university-wide databases.

But will they get better at being smart human beings who can think for themselves?

Hard to say.

In a sop to something or other we are told that "We will...Celebrate the human condition through innovation and creativity in the performing arts and humanities."

I'm not sure how much time my humanities and fine arts colleagues spend "celebrating" the human condition.  We contemplate it.  We study it.  We try to get students to understand themselves and their mounting student debt as part of a historically contingent reality that explains but also extends beyond immediate exigencies. We expose them to the variety of ways that people have sought to make sense of themselves and their worlds and we encourage them to value these four years as a time to explore realities other than the ones they know intimately and those determined by their life circumstances.  It's not just the work of the arts and humanities to encourage this kind of broad and open-ended thinking; science teaching does it, too.  It also gets harder all the time.

Documents like this draft strategic plan don't help.  It balances the purpose of the university on the training of an entry-level work force and justifies its public value as a monetizable one.  If it is meant to be a Trojan horse hiding an older alternative understanding of public higher education within a gift that will please our state legislators and their constituents, that hatch in the belly is well hidden indeed.

Not every public institution of higher ed is giving up quite this completely.  Compare the "Announcement of Comprehensive Planning and Analysis Process" issued by the Berkeley campus of the University of California system.  Granted, it's a campus and not the university as a whole, and granted, they offering transparency in an ongoing process, not demonstrating the leadership of the new executive in a shaken institution.

Still.

Berkeley frames the need for a strategic plan not with the putatively inexorable need for the public university to be "an engine of for economic growth" but by frank acknowledgement of "a substantial and growing structural deficit, one that...does not reflect a short-term dip in funding, but a 'new normal' era of reduced state support."  Berkeley, like the University of Illinois "must focus not only on the immediate challenge, but also on the deeper task of enhancing our institution’s long-term sustainability and self-reliance."  However, unlike Illinois, Berkeley recognizes an inevitable cost, and certain values that must be maintained:

This endeavor must not be interpreted as an abandonment of our commitment to a public mission nor to our efforts to advocate for increased public funding for higher education. We are fighting to maintain our excellence against those who might equate “public” with mediocrity, against those who have lost faith in the need for higher education to serve as an engine of social mobility, and against those who no longer believe that university-based inquiry and research have the power to shape our society and economy for the better. What we are engaged in here is a fundamental defense of the concept of the public university, a concept that we must reinvent in order to preserve.

Throughout the state of Illinois, the public university (and the community college system that feeds it) is getting reinvented out from us.  The concept of the university that gets preserved may have little to do with the values that we were trained to uphold.

Backchanneling

For those keeping score at home, as of today, Steven Salaita's lawsuit against the University of Illinois is going forward, but the University is NOT being simultaneously sued by Phyllis Wise, because she is stepping into a $300K/year faculty position and foregoing her oddly named $400K retention bonus.  And we all wait to see what happens next.

At a behemoth public R1, everyone is backchanneling.  It's the only way to get anything done in an environment where legitimate procedures are often palimpsests of every crisis that has gone before.  Some backchannels become recognized as a desire paths and get paved and maintained accordingly.  Others eventually disappear having served a brief but unremarkable purpose.  And of course there are those that, when exposed to light, reveal malfeasance and bad faith and get shut down by the ensuing outrage and kerfuffle.  It would be better if some backchannels were front channels: the frank acknowledgment of bachkchanneling is often a clear sign that neither channel is working as it should and the whole enterprise is moribund.

It's also likely that everyone has conducted some work-related business by means other than their university email or telephone.   Google (and other third party) apps are often more user-friendly and accessible than their institutional equivalents--but they often require use of a gmail account.  Social media is increasingly the way to circulate information and publicize events, but some social media platforms (Instagram) are most easily used by cellphone.  Work of all kinds is increasingly done by cell phone or tablet, maintaining firewalls between different accounts on one's personal doodads gets complicated, and no one that I know of gets a university-issued mobile device.

Let me also note that picking up a phone to do underhanded business is less simple than it once was. My university's new phone system is unusable for faculty who don't have their own individual office computers (which is most contingent faculty) or who are unwilling to download the phone-system software onto their personal devices.  Even for those who have access to office phone technology, calling outside our area code is impossible, which means that such straightforward business as returning calls from students (who generally don't have cellphone numbers with the local area code) or collaborating with a colleague at another institution has to take place from one's cell phone.

Many people, then, cope with the inevitable appearance of impropriety by the simple expedient of (a) not drawing attention to it and (b) refraining from doing things that would embarrass them if exposed.

Here's a good way to tell whether the thing you are about to do, the email you are about to send, the conversation you are having in real time is a bad idea or not:

1.  Are you doing the thing because it advances the teaching, research, and service mission of your job or because it will be to your personal benefit (glory, prestige, access to power)?
2.  If it will be to your personal benefit (broadly construed), does that benefit come at the expense of the teaching, research, and service mission of your job?

Obviously, it's a slippery standard and one that's likely to encourage laughable and contorted exercises in self-justification.

Still.

Think how different the present moment would be if the FOIA'ed emails contained some--ANY--discussion of how the program in American Indian Studies could be supported in its teaching, research and service despite the apparent necessity of "unhiring" Steven Salaita.  At no point do we read any discussion of the effects that this decision is having on American Indian Studies at the U of I, much less of how those effects might be mitigated.

These particular backchannels destroyed one campus unit's ability to fulfill the university's mission in teaching, research, and service, apparently without taking any note of the fact, so isolated was the conversation from these legitimate concerns about a university program.

One other thing.  Let it be noted that my assertion, throughout this one, of "teaching, research, and service" as the university's mission is anachronistic.  Our mission statement adds a fourth term: "The University of Illinois is among the preeminent public universities of the nation and strives constantly to sustain and enhance its quality in teaching, research, public service and economic development." In more than ten years here, I have seen no meaningful, institution-driven discussion, by any channel, of how to make this fourth addition to the traditional mission of higher education consistent with the aims of the liberal arts.  Yet there it is, framing everything we do.

Transparency

It needs to be said more loudly than it has: the program in American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign did nothing wrong.  You may question their decision to hire Steven Salaita, you may be puzzled by the program's plan to morph into a program in global indigenous studies, you may wish that the traditional academic disciplines gave enough attention to indigenous people to eliminate the need for a separate program.  Sure. Fine. Whatever.  Every innovative academic program has its naysayers. The fact remains: the procedure by which Salaita was selected and vetted was above board, by the book, subject to every procedural check-and-balance the academy has to offer.

http://www.ais.illinois.edu/mascot/news/archive/2010/beyondhistory.aspx

Don't believe me?  It's safe to assume that if there were procedural oversights or irregularities, they would have been splashed all over the front page of the Champaign Urbana News-Gazette by now. But go ahead and FOIA them.  They've been FOIA'ed repeatedly on the matter this year, so the relevant documents are all queued up and ready to go.  

The Day the Liberal Arts Died

Just to be clear, it was a long, long time ago.  The fatal wound took place in the Reagan era.  What we're observing now is not even the death throes.  It just took some of us longer than others to realize we were dealing with a corpse.  L'Affaire Salaita, if nothing else, laid that truth bare.

A certain forensic fascination remains in picking through FOIA-ed emails, the way we close-read tweets last summer.  Was Salaita subject to procedural irregularities?  Yup--procedures are, as a result, being altered to it easier for those outside the faculty chain of shared governance to intervene when necessary.  Did administrators lie?  YES!  They lied.  Will we be censured for their malfeasance?  The official decision still lies a few weeks away, but it looks like, yes, we will be censured.  Does anyone care?

Well, that's the thing.  Some people care very much.  They read my blog and my live-tweeting/facebooking of the relevant meetings.   They ask the probing questions at these events, they make their anger known, they speak to colleagues elsewhere who decry what is happening here.

They attended last month/s IPRH event to discuss the likelihood of AAUP censure and they were eloquent in their shock and dismay.

They asked trenchant questions at the first Town Hall with the new University of Illinois President, Timothy Killeen, and they elicited stirring boilerplate from him about the centrality of the arts and letters and the importance of academic freedom (even if the real questions remained unanswered).

What becomes increasingly clear, however, is that none of this matters.  There may have been a time when these stalwart voices from the liberal arts lay at the core of the university's purpose and mission, but that time is long past.  All year the administration has granted us, and we have supplied ourselves with, echo chambers in which to hear ourselves amplify our outdated convictions about our significance--senate meetings, academic freedom symposia, town halls, colloquiums, meetings.  Over and over we've seen representatives of the administration--Chancellor Wise, most notably, but also, at the IPRH symposium on AAUP censure, the outgoing academic senate chair, Roy Campbell--nurture our illusions by allowing us to vent our impotent rage at them.

Meanwhile the real work of the university, the grantsmanship, the corporate partnerships, the entrepreneurial endeavors, the channeling of state funds into lucrative endeavors, goes on.

What happens next?  I don't know.  But a meaningful answer that changes things can only come from us.

When the Words Crumble

The Chancellor just wrote to all of us here, explaining her decision not to have the Board of Trustees approve the hiring of Steven Salaita,  Her letter, which is also posted on her institutional blog, concludes,

I am committed to working closely with you to identify how the campus administration can support our collective duty to inspire and facilitate thoughtful consideration of diverse opinions and discourse on challenging issues.

I really shouldn't be sitting here writing this right now.  I have a syllabus to finish fine-tuning in preparation for classes on Monday.  Its subtext is not particularly unusual and can be summed as follows:

words matter

No doubt in the weeks ahead, as I discuss on this blog some of the innovations I'm planning and describe my successes and failures, I will say more about how my carefully thought out sequences of readings and deft writing prompts serve that goal.  But for now, I'm just writing against a profound sense of futility.   Everything I do rests on the assumption that it is important for students to read closely, think hard about what they read, and communicate as clearly as they can in response to it.  And our Chancellor says this:

I am committed to working closely with you to identify how the campus administration can support our collective duty to inspire and facilitate thoughtful consideration of diverse opinions and discourse on challenging issues.

Does anyone ever really read the last sentence of an administrative email?  It's ordinarily an anodyne string of words, that seeks to do rather than say: bringing closure to the business at hand with a tone of warmth and collegiality.  L'Affaire Salaita has taught us, however, that this kind of formulaic boilerplate has content.  Sometimes.  For example: "This recommendation for appointment is subject to the approval by the Board of Trustees..."  Since the Board of Trustees historically has only met to approve appointments after the appointed faculty has been on the course roster for months, relocated to the institution in question, and taught for several weeks, the phrase "Is subject to" has generally meant "will receive."  If it didn't mean that, the course schedule, payroll, office space allocations for the semester due to begin Monday would be thrown into disarray.  But things are proceeding normally.  We're to assume those words bore the full weight of their literal meaning this one time, for this one hire.  

So what does our Chancellor mean when she calls herself "committed to working closely with you to identify exactly how the campus administration can support our collective duty"?  After all, what is a Chancellor supposed to do, if not support the faculty in doing the work of the university?  Of course, "supporting our collective duty" generally means stepping back and letting individual departments and colleges get on with the work of deciding whom to hire and tenure--not "working closely."  Same with "facilitat[ing] thoughtful consideration of diverse opinions and discourse on challenging issues."  That project is dear to many faculty who host conferences, engage with other scholars in a variety of formats, bring speakers to campus.  In this case, Wise's efforts to "work closely" seem to have backfired, as the list of faculty now boycotting the campus grows daily.  One conference "on challenging issues" scheduled for the fall has already been cancelled, as have two prestigious lectures.  

One obvious way to signal a commitment to "working closely" would be to address these consequences of her decisions.  In the absence of such acknowledgment, one is left to wonder what this "working closely" means.  If she's serious about refusing to tolerate "disrespectful words or actions that demean," I for one would be happy to help her organize a week long series of talks, teach-ins, and screenings about the use of native American caricatures, to conclude with a ritual bonfire on the Quad where newly enlightened students could burn their Chief t-shirts.  I'm guessing that's not what she has in mind though.   

So I'll get back to work on my syllabus and try not to think about the contrast between what I want my students to learn and how my institution communicates its mission.  

Does Your Syllabus Have a Trigger Warning?

So first there was this: the New Republic's article about "trigger warnings" moving from the blogosphere to class syllabi.  The subtitle, "Can It Be Stopped?" conveys the tone of the article: maybe not, says Jenny Jarvie, but it should be:

Trigger warnings are presented as a gesture of empathy, but the irony is they lead only to more solipsism, an over-preoccupation with one’s own feelings—much to the detriment of society as a whole. Structuring public life around the most fragile personal sensitivities will only restrict all of our horizons. Engaging with ideas involves risk, and slapping warnings on them only undermines the principle of intellectual exploration. We cannot anticipate every potential trigger—the world, like the Internet, is too large and unwieldy. But even if we could, why would we want to? Bending the world to accommodate our personal frailties does not help us overcome them.

And then there was this response in Salon: "Trigger Warnings on Campus: What the Critics Are Missing." What the critics are missing, according to Katie McDonough is that "trigger warnings are an imperfect but sometimes necessary band-aid on the open and gaping wounds plaguing college campuses — rampant sexual violence, for starters. Singling out trigger warnings as the greater problem in need of addressing is, perhaps, missing the point." Trigger warnings, McDonough argues, will not solve the problems of sexual violence (among other things) on campus, but they do help to create spaces where the traumatic experiences students bring to the classroom are acknowledged.

I fantasize about a local ordinance requiring unlicensed Chief Illiniwek gear to have a trigger warning printed, in big letters, on the back, like the warnings on liquor and cigarettes. Same with the upcoming festival of binge drinking known hereabouts as Unofficial St. Patricks Day (the workaround local bar owners have devised for the unfortunate timing of the real St. Patrick's Day which falls over spring break, when students are out of town).

So while my institution benignly waves on genocide and substance abuse, what responsibilities do I have for the triggers embedded in the material I teach?

It's important to note what a "trigger warning" is NOT: it's not an explicit authorization for students to steer clear of material that might unsettle them and it's not censorship-in-advance of material on sensitive topics. Rather, it strikes me as a solution--one I had not considered--to a very real problem: making class discussion open to all participants. Whenever I teach texts that involve scenes of sexual violence or substance abuse or racial violence, I am always uncomfortably aware that some students have more personal insight into these topics than others. That material that, for some students exists on the same plane of unfamiliarity as Candide's trip to El Dorado is for other students, a pressing daily reality. I know this because students tell me, later, in office hours, why they hung back in a particular discussion, why they were reluctant to speak, why they decided to skip class that day.

The fiction that all students meet the course material in the same place is necessary for creating discussions that are ultimately about the material and not about the students. Inviting students to talk about their own experience can--most people learn the hard way--give discussion a tone of group therapy that most instructors are not trained to manage productively and that diverts energy from the course content. But it's also a fiction that gives students no framework for meshing their own painful experience with course material that touches on it. A trigger warning might not, ultimately, change anything about how a particular text gets taught, but it will frame the teaching of the text with the fact that violence it depicts is real, with real-world effects.

The #alt-ac Snake that Eats Its Own Tail

Two Penn State deans ask where the people with humanities Ph.D's end up, and get an answer: college teaching, off the tenure track.  Yup--we knew that.  But the graphic evidence is still, you know, graphic. And it's nicely timed to coincide with today's NY Times editorial on higher ed (and the op-ed page gets it right this time).

Some of those savvy underemployed Ph,D's, however, have found ways to get paid to identify the problem and fix it.  Check out this solution to the adjunct problem!

1. Adjuncts must be paid enough to make it worth their while. 

Obviously, “worth their while” is a different number depending on many things: field, market forces like scarcity of qualified adjunct faculty, union rules, etc. But as an institution, if you want to attract the best teachers and ensure that they are able to reach their potential as teachers, you must pay them enough to make it worth their while to teach instead of doing other things with their time, whether those other things are income-earning or not.

Well, yes--but if institutions perceived that teaching carried value that should be properly remunerated, we wouldn't need articles like this one, would we?  What else you got?

"You can rent the books from the library for free!"

Several times now I've heard students use the phrase "rent books from the library," by which they mean, of course, "borrow books...."  Yet they say "rent."  A mere adaptation of language, or a chilling symptom of What's Wrong with Everything?

Colbert Explains What's Wrong with College Sports

In place of a 500-word blog post on the subject I give you:


(and you only have to watch half of the clip--the rest is about the NFL).

The follow-up from Chapel Hill?  UNC Stops Literacy Research of Reading Specialist .

And this is why we can't have nice things.

Reasons to be grateful that nothing rhymes with "orange"...

One nightmare vision of the future of higher education.  Only it's real. (from a Facebook friend).